Twitter as Disruptive Innovation in Sport Communication

[It would not be long] ere the whole surface of this country would be channelled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land, making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country.

Samuel F. B. Morse When the telegraph first burst onto the scene in 1844, early critics saw its “immediacy and brevity as a threat to letter writing, [while] ironically, the telegraph highlighted the permanence of letter writing in that it remained an important medium” (Murthy, 2012, p. 1060). Although some of the negative reviews of the telegraph focused on standardization of content and format, more positive reviews indicated that the telegraph actually increased the power of the press by adding increased timeliness to newspaper content (Bryant & Holt, 2006). The Chicago Tribune in 1897 used the telegraph to “live cast” the “Fight of the Century” between “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and “Ruby Rob” Fitzsimmons held in Carson City Nevada, providing updates from the fight every 30 s (Stephens, 1983). Many have said that the telegraph changed modern communication and as the previous example shows, it also had a profound effect on how sport communication could occur. Perhaps the same can be said of Twitter in the modern era. The similarities between Twitter and the telegraph are apparent: brevity (140 characters on Twitter), timeliness (instant communication), and the creation of neighborhood (community). Thus, many would agree that Twitter has become a disruptive force in sport communication today, one that warrants our attention as researchers.

A disruptive innovation involves a new product or service that leads to a new way of doing business, one that is both different, and in conflict, with the current way of operating (Charitou & Markides, 2003). Developments brought on by Web 2.0 now allow fans to tweet, text, blog, and Facebook, all while watching the game, providing a new and enriched fandom experience (Pegoraro, 2013). This has disrupted the traditional model of sport delivery—from the one-to-many, single-medium framework of sport consumption traditionally offered by television to the many-to-many possibilities of Internet-enabled sport participatory consumption (Rowe, 2011). A fundamental part of disruptive innovation is the attraction of new consumers who desire the new product and/or service or a more efficient or cost-effective way to access a preexisting or previously unavailable product. Twitter has allowed sport consumers to interact with teams, organizations, and athletes in ways that were not previously possible and vice versa (Pegoraro, 2013). The growth of Twitter use (Smith, 2013), particularly in relation to sport, indicates that consumers were looking for this new way of consuming and communicating about sport.

What has made Twitter so disruptive as a new communication medium is that it did not start with a clear purpose; rather it developed its own market and purpose as users adopted it (Rogers, 2014). Twitter did things that other platforms like Facebook and tools like short messaging service already covered, but it did them in a different, more public way, and in its early days, it was up to the users to define how this platform would be utilized. This process has led to a transformation in Twitter from being a new “social” network to the information network that it is now. Twitter is helping to “produce stories about sports, intensifying and proliferating media sports content and information available in the public sphere, and forcing new ways of thinking about the interaction between sport and digital media by sports organizations, athletes, journalists, publicists and fans” (Hutchins, 2011 p. 239). Twitter is now an essential part of the current day sport media experience as well a frame through which this media experience is filtered and understood (Hutchins, 2011). As Twitter becomes more popular, it also becomes potentially more disruptive (Sheffer, & Schultz, 2010), adding another layer to the already crowded and complicated “media sport cultural complex” (Rowe, 2004). In this new complex sport media world, broadcast and print media are being challenged, in some cases bypassed and in others complemented by the new digital networked media sport (Rowe, 2011). The disruptive force, that is, Twitter, demands our attention as researchers; we are obligated to observe how its use and users change as the platform itself evolves and its place in the sport communication realm is solidified.

Just as it is difficult for markets and companies to get a handle on disruptive innovations because by their very nature their potential is hard to define, it is equally hard for researchers to study these innovations, mostly because it is hard to predict how they are going to behave and where they are going to fit into the larger picture. But by getting in on the ground floor and studying any innovation, researchers can help shape what they mean to the wider research community and to determine whether (and where) they fit into the theory and the field. Sport communication researchers (e.g. Hambrick, Simmons, Greenhalgh, & Greenwell, 2010, Pegoraro, 2010) have done this with Twitter by being some of the first researchers to investigate this innovation, to examine the effects, and to explore Twitter’s place within the body of sport communication knowledge.

Researchers, who take on the study of new phenomena, often find their work is not well received by the research community, facing skepticism and outright rejection. What we as researchers, editors, and peer reviewers need to remember is that the research process and the building of theory

is not a neat and tidy, linear process of consistent incremental progress. It is a manifestly human endeavor, which is to say that it is often hit and miss, two steps forward and one step back, a process more cluttered by incomplete explorations of conceptual and practical cul-de-sacs than punctuated by aha! experiences. (Stewart, 1997, p. 186)

This observation is probably most true when studying disruptive innovations like Twitter, a platform that has the potential to permanently change the sport communication model.

As researchers take on the study of innovations such as Twitter, it is important that they situate their research within the field as a foundation for future endeavors. Wenner (1989) proposed three categories of research agendas in sport communication study: production of sport texts, content of sports texts, and audience consuming sport texts. If we examine sport communication Twitter research to date, all three of these categories have been touched upon: production of sport texts (e.g. Sheffer & Schultz, 2010), content of sport texts (e.g. Browning & Sanderson, 2012; Pegoraro, 2010), and the audience consuming sport texts (e.g. Frederick, Lim, Clavio, & Walsh, 2012)

Applying theory to different circumstances allows the identification of key concepts and their relationship to each other and provides a foundation for a new research track in any field. Early Twitter researchers have done this by extending existing sport communication theories (Yoo, Smith, & Kim, 2013) to the study of Twitter, such as agenda setting (e.g. Frederick, Burch, & Blaszka, 2013) uses and gratifications theory (e.g. Clavio & Kian, 2010), parasocial interaction (e.g. Frederick et al., 2012; Kassing & Sanderson, 2010), and social identity theory (e.g. Smith & Smith, 2012).

Research often compares “new” communication technologies with their recent technological predecessors. For example, television was compared with radio when it was first introduced (Barnouw, 1968). But we need to break out of this mold, instead challenging the rather static prevailing models of old versus new media and ensuring that Twitter is not merely dismissed as a fad. Leonard (2009) puts it in much more succinct and specific way:

Scholarship must push beyond the boundaries that see old and new media in opposition and that devalue the knowledge, representations, and identities disseminated through new media technologies as insignificant, kid’s stuff, and the extreme to see, theorize, and analyze the continuities and links … we must continue to react to the ever-changing nature of sporting landscapes resulting from innovation and technological changes, not simply categorizing metamorphosis as indicative of the new media era of sport but reflecting on the impact and significance of these transformations. (p. 12)

Therefore, the future of Twitter research in sport communication lies in the ongoing research process we have started, thorough empirical observation that is insightfully blended with equally comprehensive theoretical analysis. It is this process of incremental, nonlinear, and often-serendipitous discovery that will lead to new theories and models that clearly capture the complexity of Twitter as part of the digital networked media sport world and its significance for sport communication.